New york times

Thursday

Ben Domenech

Cocaine is a helluva drug

Welcome to Thunderdome, where this week our podcast is all about cocaine and cocaine accessories as the guys discuss the latest speculation for a White House that seems out of control. If you’ve got bad news, you wanna kick them blues — so listen here, and subscribe here!So let’s get one thing straight: the betting odds on this White House cocaine thing are totally out of whack. BetOnline, an offshore gaming platform, opened up the bidding at +170 for Hunter, followed by +800 for... Travis Kelce? The Kansas City Chiefs tight end was at the White House a month ago — how often does BetOnline think the White House gets inspected? Kelce is at +800, followed by “One of the Jonas Brothers” at +1000, followed by a string of nonsensical celebrities.

hunter biden cocaine white house

Friday

Cockburn

Nikole Hannah-Jones almost goes back to work

Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the "1619 Project”, almost brought herself to lift a finger in defense of affirmative action — almost. She took to Twitter on Thursday to denounce the recent Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action. The anger was not strong enough, though, to make it worth picking up the pen. Hannah-Jones tweeted: “Was going to write an essay about it, but why even bother. (Also, Clarence Thomas is actually irrelevant here. So thanks but no thanks)” The Wall Street Journal’s new editor-in-chief has criticized the work ethic of the paper’s staff, but clearly the New York Times is not much better — Hannah-Jones wrote her last piece for the paper in February 2023, which itself was the first in two years.

europe nikole hannah-jones

Monday

Amber Duke

Beware the New York Times kids section

“Stinky. Sweaty. Hairy. Pimply. Totally Normal.”  That’s the seemingly innocent tagline of the “Puberty Issue” of the New York Times for Kids, which appears in the print newspaper on the last Sunday of every month.  The kids section, which was started in March 2017 as a part of the New York Times magazine department, often looks harmless at first glance. The cover typically boasts colorful and engaging artwork, while inside, children are greeted with cartoons, games, puzzles and mini articles about cool accomplishments by other kids. Past issues covered how kids could spend their summer vacations, interesting facts about bugs and other creepy critters, and how to start growing a garden.

The New York Times for Kids ‘Puberty Issue’ (Amber Athey/The Spectator)

Monday

Tevi Troy

White House Plumbers is a busted flush

I suspected something was wrong when I first heard that HBO would be producing a TV series called White House Plumbers. The network initially said it would be coming in 2023, date unspecified. Then the show was scheduled for March, but as March approached, the network added no specificity regarding the release date. March came and went, a worrisome sign, as did April. The show finally appeared last night, May 1 — a Monday night, not the Sunday night HBO reserves for its best stuff. Upon watching the first of five scheduled episodes, I can see the reason for the delay. I told my wife I planned to watch the show, so she gave the trailer a go. “I could only watch half of it,” she reported back. “It was so bad.

white house plumbers
Matt Purple

My raging case of ‘climate anxiety’

Recently, I came down with a severe case of climate anxiety. Not because I was worried about global warming but because the globe wasn't getting warm enough. It has been an unseasonably cold spring here on the East Coast. As recently as two weeks ago, a winter storm thrashed the Northeast, while last week the temperature here in Virginia kept getting stuck the 50s. Of course, our science-positive betters insist that a single spell of cold weather can't be used to challenge the climate change "consensus." But then they also seize upon every drought, heat wave, wildfire, hurricane, tornado, flood, derecho, hailstorm, rainstorm, power outage, riot, and coup in Myanmar to argue in favor of climate change. So no wonder some are feeling a little on edge.

Wednesday

Cockburn

Fauci retcons the pandemic in laughable NYT interview

The New York Times published an extensive interview with Anthony Fauci on Tuesday, and the doc still shows little remorse. To his credit, Times reporter David Wallace-Wells did not let Fauci off easily — there was no Joe Biden treatment in this one.  Fauci, as usual, showed himself a master of illusion. Take his assertion that “only 68 percent of the country is vaccinated. If you rank us among both developed and developing countries, we do really poorly.” Really? Well that depends on what you mean by “vaccinated”. If that means you got the first shot — the only one that actually provided transmission protection — then the US actually did quite well, with 80 percent receiving at least one dose.

fauci

Friday

Cockburn

Afghanistan lacks #BlackGirlMagic, laments top US diplomat

White House correspondents behaving badly Getting President Biden to answer to the press is hard enough. His handlers in the administration make it even tougher. And now it seems journalists are linking arms with them to help the aging president out. Tamara Keith, current head of the White House Correspondents’ Association and its apparent hall monitor, chastised her colleagues in an email a tipster passed to Cockburn about “decorum.” (Cockburn, you will be shocked to hear, is not a WHCA member and so is at liberty) Keith took umbrage when “at least three journalists continued loudly shouting” over a reporter, “making it impossible for the president to hear and answer the question. It didn’t reflect well on our profession.

afghanistan blackgirlmagic

Monday

Cockburn

The New York Times would like you to have more sex, please

America isn’t having enough sex. Phew. Cockburn thought it was just him — but now the New York Times is issuing a call-to-arms: Americans need to bump uglies more! In the national paper of record, Magdalene J. Taylor wrote a guest essay in favor of sex, arguing that it is a "critical part of our social wellbeing, not an indulgence or an afterthought" and explaining “across almost every demographic group, American adults old and young, single and coupled, rich and poor are having less sex than they have had at any point in at least the past three decades.” She goes on to say that, “In the 1990s, about half of Americans were having sex weekly or more — that figure is now under 40 percent. For many who are having sex, the frequency has dropped precipitously.

Gaitskill sex pill sex

Thursday

Mary Kate Skehan

Ali Slagle’s low-stress supper

Who is Ali Slagle? A fan of New York Times Cooking might recognize the name: nine of their fifty most popular recipes of 2022 are credited to her, the most of any of their contributors, including household names like J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and Melissa Clark. But despite the tremendous popularity of her recipes, Slagle herself is a bit mysterious. She crops up, cheerfully and occasionally, on NYT Cooking channels. Her 142,000 Instagram followers are a mere fraction of the followings of her food-celebrity contemporaries, like Molly Baz, Alison Roman, or Claire Saffitz. She doesn’t appear to be developing a platform; she has no Twitter, no Substack, no YouTube channel. She appears to live in a camper van.

ali slagle

Thursday

Cockburn

George Santos makes politics worth paying attention to

As the Republicans' on-again-off-again, will-they-won’t-they romance with Kevin McCarthy drags on, Cockburn has found refuge in a genuinely entertaining drama. Each day offers another layer to the George Santos tall-tale trifle — and as the mainstream media purports to be shocked that a politician would lie about something (gasp!), Cockburn is gobbling it up. Just yesterday, for instance, Cockburn learned the Republican congressman from New York lied about being a “‘star player’ on the volleyball team for a college [CUNY Baruch] that he did not attend” (per Business Insider). Cockburn also enjoyed hearing how Santos was involved in a Ponzi scheme fewer than two years ago.

george santos

Tuesday

David Marcus

Of course: all the great women in history were actually men

One of the great, pesky questions of human history has finally been answered. For thousands of years , as we all know, most great accomplishments were the works of men. But now and then there was an outlier, a woman doing great things. Esther in the Bible, Joan of Arc or Elizabeth I of England. It made no sense — but today, thanks to the tireless work of gender studies departments we know the truth: those weren’t women at all. They were actually men. This weekend we had further confirmation of this revelation from the New York Times which ran a piece revealing that Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, was a trans man. We know this because sometimes Alcott went by “Lou” and mentioned having a “boys' spirit.” I’m sold.

louisa may alcott women

Friday

Matt Purple

The Covid hysterics’ bleak midwinter

A great scourge has descended upon the land, leaving in its wake a path of misery and girlfriends shivering under blankets. Crops have been destroyed, and there are times when (after 5 p.m.) it can seem like we might never see the sun again. Yet the greatest terror ushered in by this darkness is its plague, a relentless onslaught of mild coughs and sniffly noses that seems to have left just about everyone feeling marginally annoyed. The ancients had a word for it, winter, and it's eliciting trembles of horror from the Cassandras over at the New York Times. New Yorkers, the Times recently croaked, "are living not just among the coronavirus and its seemingly endless variants, but a bunch of other viruses too." This "bunch" includes such baffling ailments as the common cold and the flu.

covid

Monday

Cockburn

Nikole Hannah-Jones to join NYT walkout

The New York Times Guild announced on Friday that about 1,000 of its members would walk out if their demands regarding raises and pensions, among other issues, were not addressed by December 8, this coming Thursday. And Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project essayist, has since announced her intention to join the walkout. Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men?... Cockburn is somewhat perplexed, because to participate in a walkout, you would presumably have to be an active employee doing some form of work for the New York Times. Hannah-Jones tweeted on December 3 that, “I will be joining my NYTimesGuild colleagues in walking out if [the New York Times] doesn’t agree to a fair contract by December 8.

nikole hannah-jones

Monday

Ben Domenech

Dave Portnoy is the degenerate gambling king

Why do people in the media keep trying to make a story out of Barstool Sports head honcho Dave Portnoy being exactly the person he claims to be? It just keeps happening. Most recently comes a pathetic attempt at a New York Times exposé that does little more than expose Portnoy for being everything his listeners, readers and fans know him to be: a mouthy, opinionated, over-the-top degenerate gambler and the court jester of a sports and gambling conglomerate that has become a dominating cultural force under his leadership. The Times apparently thinks their readership is unaware of all of this, and deems it noteworthy that he has had to climb out of the pit of gambling-fueled bankruptcy in the past. I'm only surprised that his losses were only $30,000, not ten times that.

dave portnoy
Casey Chalk

Debunking the grievance industry in our schools

City Journal last month released a survey that asked eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds whether they had been taught six concepts related to critical race theory. These included: “America is a systemically racist country,” “White people have white privilege,” “White people have unconscious biases that negatively affect non-white people," “America is built on stolen land,” “America is a patriarchal society,” and “Gender is an identity choice.” Each of these was answered in the affirmative by a majority of participants, of whom more than 80 percent attended public schools. That’s curious given that public educators and their defenders in corporate media have been claiming for years that CRT is not taught in schools.

Thursday

Amber Duke

The disinformation police are the worst purveyors of disinformation

The Department of Homeland Security announced last spring that they would form a "Disinformation Governance Board" to track and combat so-called fake news. The DHS disbanded the board in May after widespread criticism of its Orwellian intentions — as well as the fact that its chosen czar was a purveyor of disinformation. Nina Jankowicz claimed that Hunter Biden's laptop was "Russian disinformation," spread the false story that Trump had ties to a Russian bank and dismissed the notion that Critical Race Theory was being taught in public schools. Jankowicz was merely one example of an increasingly obvious reality: the individuals policing "disinformation" are themselves disseminating lies.

reality czar disinformation

Thursday

Peter Van Buren

Will the Supreme Court make it easier to sue the media?

Donald Trump is suing CNN for $475 million for defamation, claiming the network associated him with Adolf Hitler and portrayed him as a Russian lackey. E. Jean Carroll is in turn suing Trump for defamation in connection with him allegedly raping her. Mike “MyPillow” Lindell is being sued for $1.3 billion for defamation in connection with remarks he made about the 2020 presidential election being false. And way outside politics in America, a foreign English teacher in Thailand faces two years in jail for defamation over a negative online review of a resort he stayed at. What is defamation? Why is it so hard to prove in the United States but relatively easy to prove in most other countries?

defamation

Friday

Peter Van Buren

Project Veritas is being punished for practicing journalism

It used to be called the "New York Times Problem." It asks at what point does the First Amendment stop protecting journalists against the receipt of stolen property, particularly classified documents. “The Problem” stems originally from the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the Vietnam War stolen by Daniel Ellsberg and handed over to the Times and later others. The government sought prison time for reporters and editors but failed. What once threatened the Times has now been turned directly against Project Veritas, Ashley Biden's diary, and perhaps Julian Assange as well.

Friday

Ben Domenech

The ignorance of Queen Elizabeth’s ‘anti-colonialist’ critics

As Alexander Larman writes, the passage of the Queen is not a tragedy. No life lived so well, so dutifully, and with such faith in so many things now lost to us can be considered a tragedy. But it is nonetheless very sad, even for those of us in America — a nation she loved in so many ways. Her death seems like another blow to another important institution of the West, undermined in recent decades by boomer proclivities and millennial narcissism, and likely to break into a thousand pieces in the absence of the old-world values Elizabeth represented. What is more tragic, and more offensive, is the degree to which the Queen's passing has been met by historical ignorance from the anti-Western left and its attendant useful idiots on the decadence-obsessed right.

Wednesday

Matt Purple

It’s only a culture war when the right does it

Having recently botched South African history, the New York Times is now turning its sights to Australia. Our friends Down Under are holding an election this week in which the Australian Labor Party is expected to beat the Liberal-National coalition for the first time since 2013. (For Americans in need of a guide, the capital-L Liberals in Canada stand for the left, in Australia for the right, and in the UK for nothing whatsoever.) It's the issue of trans rights in the Australian campaign that has the Times's unisex knickers in a twist. They're worried in particular about one candidate, Katherine Deves, a Liberal running for a seat in parliament. Deves has said that trans youths who undergo gender-transition surgeries are being "mutilated.

times